A Judge Shut Down the DOJ’s Attempt to Subpoena New York Times Reporters for Covering His Qatari Jet’s Security Flaws

Donald Trump flew in his shiny “new” Qatari jet to the recent NATO summit in Ankara, but left Turkey aboard the older Air Force One, switching back to the Qatari jet partway home at a U.K. air base. According to reporting by The New York Times, that’s because the Secret Service told Trump his luxury “gift” jet didn’t have all of the necessary security features. Trump’s response to that reporting: subpoenas for the reporters who broke the story in a blatant attempt to chill the freedom of the press. Thankfully, a federal judge’s criticism of the investigation led the Trump DOJ to withdraw its own subpoenas—at least for now.

The New York Times explains its own legal win:

“Either we can quash the subpoenas, or you could withdraw the subpoenas,” the judge told Sean Buckley, a top official in the U.S. attorney’s office in Manhattan, who was speaking on behalf of the government.

Judge Subramanian then grilled the prosecutors for the vast majority of the hourlong hearing, his demeanor at times resembling a teacher scolding his pupils. He asked few questions of The Times’s lawyers; at one point, he even apologized to one of them and promised time to respond to some of the government’s statements.

Under the judge’s questioning, the government acknowledged factual errors in its filings. It conceded that it had omitted significant information — including that the case pertained to journalists’ records — when it asked a different federal judge to prevent a phone company from disclosing a record request.

“The inadvertent errors and the ‘in hindsight we should have done things differently,’ these things are piling up,” the judge said.

That the government’s harassment of people who merely irritate the president—rather than any coherent notion of “political enemies”—is often clownish doesn’t make it any less dangerous to press freedom. The Times fought back, but many companies and media outlets do not. Clearly, the embarrassment from incidents like this one is not enough to dissuade the administration from pursuing a maximalist strategy of legal harassment using the Department of Justice.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

© The UnPopulist, 2026

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